A new dawn for China's solar industry?

The prolonged Hanergy scandal drew copious attention from the capital market towards the world’s largest solar module manufacturing country, China. While the issues with the self-claimed largest solar thin film producer stem more from its internal financial governance, the market also took the chance to utterly revisit the outlook of the nation’s solar PV sector, which accounted for 0.7 per cent of the total export of China in 2014. The Chinese solar industry has been facing a forbidding downturn since 2012, when the market started to deeply discount valuation of the listed players, citing the excess production capacity and their over-dependence on export. The biggest names have not benefited from the country’s stock market boom this year since they are mostly listed offshore in Hong Kong or New York. Today, the haze from overcapacity remains – for instance, China’s annual...